Online bill pay systems allow a user to pay bills received from various payees through a website portal of a financial institution. These online bill payment systems (sometimes called online bill payment applications or online bill payment solutions) are offered by financial institutions such as banks, credit unions, credit card issuers, etc. The online bill pay systems allow a user to view, review, and/or make payments and pay bills to various payees from the user's financial account at the respective financial institutions.
Before bills can be paid electronically, a user sets up bill pay for a particular payee using the on-line bill payment system. The user sets up bill pay by selecting payees from a list of available payees provided by the online bill payment system or by entering payee information. The user may set up one payee or multiple payees to pay various bills or loans such as credit card bills, cell phone bills, phone bills, gas and electric bills, cable or satellite television, automobile loans, a mortgage or home equity loan, etc.
After the payees are set up, the user navigates to the online bill payment website or page using a web browser on a web enabled device, such as a personal computer, smartphone or tablet computing device connected to the Internet and manually enters payment instructions for each payee that the user desires to make a payment. These instructions indicate the account to be utilized as the source of funds, the payee, the payment amount and the payment date. The payment may be for a full outstanding balance, the minimum required payment, or another amount specified by the user. In this way, once the user sets up the payment instructions or preferences for a payee, the bill payment system can be utilized by the user to specify payments according to user input or make payments to the payee without any further action by the user.
While providing many conveniences to the user, currently available online bill payment systems have some limitations too. For example, it is not uncommon for a user to have multiple accounts such as checking, savings, money market and credit card accounts at the financial institution whose online bill pay system is utilized. Further, the user may have one or multiple other accounts at one, two, three and other numbers of financial institutions. Consequently, there may be various deposits to, withdraws or payments from, and transfers between various accounts of various financial institutions.
Given these account activities and complexities, one challenge users of online bill payment systems face is ensuring that the account to be utilized to electronically pay a bill has sufficient funds on the payment date, and that accounts for other scheduled payments have sufficient funds for their payments. For this purpose, the user may log into the account, view the current balance and any scheduled bill payments, look to see when other bills may be paid or when the user may receive a deposit from an employer, and make a best guess whether the account has or will have sufficient funds or whether a fund transfer is required. This can be inconvenient and quite complicated, particularly when the user has multiple accounts at the financial institution hosting the bill payment system and various accounts and other financial institutions, particularly when the user may not know all of the account details or transactions that may affect the end goal of having sufficient funds in an account for the bill payment. These uncertainties and complications are made even more complex when the user has multiple accounts, other accounts at other financial institutions, or a joint account with a spouse or other joint owner since the joint owner may have deposits, payments or transfers of which the other owner is not aware.
Given these issues, the user may consider the following factors or questions when reviewing user and/or spouse accounts and account activities when considering electronic bill payments: Do we have sufficient money in the funding account to pay a bill? How many payments have already been scheduled for the month against this funding account? When will I receive my next paycheck? Is the payment large? Should I split the payment across multiple accounts? Should I transfer money between accounts? Should I use my credit card? Which of my various credit cards should I utilize? What are the available credits on my credit cards and what are the APRs for the credit cards I could use?
Consequently, it can be difficult to navigate and know various account information of a user's various accounts to determine whether sufficient funds are available for an electronic bill payment. While electronic bill payments are intended to simplify a user's finances and make bill payments more convenient to users, it is often the case that the user has to consider various factors and data of various accounts that may be utilized by various account holders, and try to assess whether a particular account is suitable or has sufficient funds for electronic bill payment on a particular date.